A variety of golf club heads have been proposed employing resin reinforced fiber plastic faces in order to create a high durability club capable of hitting golf balls a long distance. Use of a synthetic resin impregnated face lowers the weight of the golf club head relative to solid wood, allowing for a faster swing, and provides a high impact resistant surface. Typical U.S. patents disclosing such heads include U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,545,580; 4,575,447; 4,624,460; 4,798,383; and 4,824,116.
While the synthetic resin reinforced fibers used in these golf clubs have excellent strength characteristics in tension, they have substantially no compressive strength or impact resistance and they must be designed so as to avoid the possibility of the resin reinforced fibers breaking under the repeated heavy forces imposed when the club face impacts golf balls.
The physics of the impact between a golf club head and a golf ball are similar to those between a baseball bat and a baseball and my co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 518,782 discloses a baseball bat having an outer layer of wood veneer and an inner layer of resin reinforced fibers. The synthetic resin impregnates both the layers and bonds them to one another. I have found the wood veneer and resin reinforced fiber layers act synergistically when bonded to one another with the wood fibers effectively distributing the forces created on impact with a ball over a substantial area of the underlying resin reinforced fibers to create a structure that is unusually impact resistant and locally deforms resiliently under impact to provide a relatively wide sweet spot so that the full power of the swinging club is transferred to the ball.